The NetBSD Project had a booth at this years Linuxworld Expo in the
Javits Center in New York City from January 21st until January 24th.
The booth was located in the depth of the .org pavillon, where we
displayed NetBSD running on a VAX, a Shark and our laptops. Since we
didn't have much hardware to display, we focused on promoting NetBSD
through our excellent promotional material:
Over the three days, we handed out 450 flyers
(http://www.netbsd.org/gallery/advocacy/flyer.pdf), 130 i386 CDs and
sold about 20-25 boxed CD sets courtesy of Wasabi Systems, who also paid
for the booth as well as donated several slinkies, stickers, snow-bowl
paper weights and NetBSD fishing hats. The generated revenue will go to
the NetBSD Foundation as well as covered the costs of printing the
flyers and the posters
(http://www.netbsd.org/gallery/advocacy/poster1e.pdf and
http://www.netbsd.org/gallery/advocacy/poster2.pdf).
Interest in the NetBSD Project was certainly high, and we received
numerous curious questions, ranging from the unavoidable ``So, ugh, what
kernel version does your distribution include? 2.4?'' and ``What's the
difference between, ugh, NetBSD and RedHat?'' over ``What's the
difference between the various BSDs?'' to highly specialized questions
regarding NetBSD installation on exotic hardware or malloc
implementations. We believe to have made a few converts, peaked some
other peoples curiosity and further encouraged our users.
A few pictures, mainly featuring atatat, elric, perry and me are at
http://www.netbsd.org/~jschauma/lwe03/
/.'s review:
``Xiph.org (the Ogg people) had our old Linux.com coworker playing
guitar. Next to them, the NetBSD booth was occupied by four gentlemen
who looked rather like members of a monastic hacking order, complete
with dark clothes and serious-looking laptops displaying endless lines
of code.''
Our general consensus: it was quite a success. Neither Free- nor
OpenBSD had a booth at this event. Given the economic situation, there
was not much swag to grab at the LinuxWorld, so people were excited that
we were giving away free CDs. For similar events in the future, it
would be nice to have some more eye-candy (think Apple) or interesting
looking hardware (the VAX and shark were good) to display. Interest in
handhelds is high, and a webcam would also be a nice addition.
We could have had more flyers on the first day (we ran out of the first
150 flyers around 1pm), so I'd estimate about 500-550 for a three day
event like this. Roland suggested looking into collaborating with other
projects, such as icculus.org, to get greater exposure.